First Impressions Of Revival Ep1: “Don’t Tell Dad”
Revival Has A Lot Of Good In Its Terrible Premiere
Revival has kind of a bad first episode in a lot of ways, but does reveal how a good premise can carry an audience through the initial setup. And that one big, showy premise can give rise to several core questions/concepts that are so intriguing, and open so many doors for seasons of storytelling that it’s hard not to want to see what could happen next.
So, what is that big, blow-out premise that springboards Revival into everything else? Well, one night in a small town, a strange sort of miracle happens. Everyone who died within a small window of time in that town comes back to life. This is not a zombie situation. It’s not an undead situation. They are fine. They recall who they were before, and just want to get back to living.
But Revival isn’t satisfied with that. The episode—and by extension, I assume the rest of the series—treats that concept with some of the level of seriousness that this would actually demand. There’s a lockdown. The CDC gets involved. The whole world has just been shown something that doesn’t follow any of the normal rules of life.
And wouldn’t you know it, that causes a lot of questions and problems. The first episode starts off its exploration of ideas with the sadly expected bigotry against people who were dead, with “zombie” being implied to already be turning into a slur. People are already asking if they should be in the same places as revived citizens. The parallels to racism are both obvious and intended by the narrative. And I have to imagine that Revival is going to have to address how this affects people’s perceptions of religion, of the afterlife, and what death might mean in a world where sometimes it doesn’t take. How does politics change when this event might happen again?
And it’s not just broad scope. There are also very interpersonal possibilities, and the Revival gives us a really, really bleak one to begin with. It shows us an older character who lost her husband one day outside the time frame. Can you imagine what that would do to someone emotionally? Can you imagine the feeling of unfairness? It’s such a unique spin on this kind of premise, and if the series keeps being this creative, it’ll be amazing.
But wow, is everything around those moments badly handled. It’s not always a thoughtful introduction with lots of ethical and legal dilemmas. It’s sometimes a campy, gory action show. The people who are revived—at least some of them—have basically superpowers, including almost-instant recovery from new injuries. And, apparently, at least one is acting more like a zombie/monster and has to be fought—possibly to a second, destroy-the-brain death.
And this is such a bad decision for this story if this becomes the norm. If the episodic rhythm becomes find the newest revived person who’s causing trouble and contain them. Maybe it won’t go that way, maybe this was one person simply not coping well with being alive again, but if Revival does go down that route, then all the revived characters are now assumed dangerous, potentially time bombs. And evoking such an overt racism allegory beforehand suddenly becomes really problematic and offensive.
And Revival having some truly shoddy unrelated writing/filmmaking moments makes me all the more worried the possible pitfalls weren’t considered. Because this show has bad pacing. It has bad structure. The amount of times the main character randomly comes across something to move the plot forward is obnoxious. By my initial count, she dramatically and suddenly stops her car three separate times because she’s come across something. One of those times is literally so we can get a long, awkward exposition scene. That’s awful writing.
It also doesn’t help that the characters are just kind of poorly established. Our main is a cop whose life is basically chaos. Her future plans are destroyed, she doesn’t seem to get along that well with anyone, and she really just wants to get out of the small town. But despite knowing all of that about her, it doesn’t feel like she’s a character. And it’s a story-wide problem. She and everyone else feel like a collection of traits. The side characters are actually more interesting—when they’re not being written as deliberately annoying—because they act as continuations of the big, interesting philosophical questions the series asks about how death affects society.
So, Revival could be a train wreck. It could start putting out amazing thought-provoking episodes, or it could turn into a messy, problematic, boring series without much to connect to. Or somehow be both. In the first few minutes, Revival does, after all, have both an unnecessary fat-phobic joke and the attention-grabbing scenario of a revived person trying to escape from a cremation machine. It’s not like it’s not forward with what it could be like. It could also be canceled after one freaking season. I’m curious enough to see. Until the end of the first season—or until it becomes unbearable—I’m going to chronicle Revival episodically. Read along if you want to see how this goes.
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